@digitaldiscipline is an instigator and sent me the Feetza image so I had to try making my own version. They aren't as elegant or realistic as the original but they came out WILDLY better than I expected.

[ID: five pictures total. The first is a screengrab of a chat where digitaldiscipline has sent me a meme showing a flatbread sculpted to look like a foot and captioned "Feetza". I reply that I'm going to have to make one. The next three images are progress photos of the "right" foot, first plain, then with red sauce and cheese and pepperoni but not cooked, and finally fully baked. The last image shows both Feetzas, the left one with pesto sauce instead of red sauce, looking footlike but also delicious. THEY WERE.]

Dearborn spotted a bug and immediately summoned backup to help her investigate. (Silverfish; I squished it but they spent the next hour returning to the corner of the bathroom just to be absolutely sure it was gone.)

[ID: A photograph of the corner of my bathroom featuring raised wooden slats as flooring and the edge of a folding door; Dearborn the tortie is crouched behind the door, staring intently at the ground, while Polk the tabby creeps over to investigate.]

Me: when Taylor Swift sings "got a lot of Starbucks lovers" in the song Blank Space, she appears to be making a play on "star crossed" but conferring on her partners a certain air of mediocrity, a status of "basic", by comparing them to a popular and accessible coffee chain. In this essay I will --

The actual lyrics when I search them after hearing the song in a store: got a long list of ex-lovers

Me: ...how much of my final grade is this worth again?

Oh interesting! The ones I've seen just use a straight sweet curry powder; admittedly the dish I've been referencing is more properly Coronation Chicken which is just one kind. In any case, the recipe I like is this one, for what it's worth!

I really should include my recipe, which is a modification of that one, in the book. But I definitely can't claim that it's the best one ever or anything.

"So, done. The cooking competition's theme this year will be curried chicken salad," Ori said. "Ylias, get me a little paragraph about that and I'll put it on all the social things this week."

"By which he means our niece will put it on all the socials," Sola said.

"Why keep a cat and chase mice yourself?" Ori asked.

I normally don't like Canva much, which is a prejudice born of being forced to use it weekly by a boss I truly despised, but I will say for some things it gets the job done. It looks credibly like a newsletter a middle-aged shopkeeper is underpaying his wife's teenage niece to assemble.

[ID: A screengrab of an email newsletter, which reads "Reclamation Day" in hippie lettering at the top. Underneath it is headed "Weekly Update: Eight Weeks to Go!" There is an article about the Cooking Competition for the festival, which will feature curried chicken salad, flanked by a clipart image of a fried chicken leg labeled "AWESOME!". Beneath that is a second article, only partly visible, about how retailers and handcrafters can now apply for stalls in the shopping and arts fair portions of the festival. Don't worry, in the book there will be a transcript included.]

"So, done. The cooking competition's theme this year will be curried chicken salad," Ori said. "Ylias, get me a little paragraph about that and I'll put it on all the social things this week."

"By which he means our niece will put it on all the socials," Sola said.

"Why keep a cat and chase mice yourself?" Ori asked.

I normally don't like Canva much, which is a prejudice born of being forced to use it weekly by a boss I truly despised, but I will say for some things it gets the job done. It looks credibly like a newsletter a middle-aged shopkeeper is underpaying his wife's teenage niece to assemble.

[ID: A screengrab of an email newsletter, which reads "Reclamation Day" in hippie lettering at the top. Underneath it is headed "Weekly Update: Eight Weeks to Go!" There is an article about the Cooking Competition for the festival, which will feature curried chicken salad, flanked by a clipart image of a fried chicken leg labeled "AWESOME!". Beneath that is a second article, only partly visible, about how retailers and handcrafters can now apply for stalls in the shopping and arts fair portions of the festival. Don't worry, in the book there will be a transcript included.]

We knew Falstaff fucks, but here we learn he fuuuucks.

[ID: A screengrab of Duolingo, showing one of the characters, an anthropomorphic bear named Falstaff, smiling broadly as he announces "Abbiamo ottanta nipoti". A banner beneath him informs us that this means "We have eighty grandchildren." I know bears often have twins but that's still a lot of grandkids.]

[The Mona Lisa] is an incredibly remarkable picture. I've seen it -- or her -- twice out of the frame, and it's an unnerving experience. Some pictures have presence...Dmitry Rybolovlev, who had Salvator Mundi, said it had vibration. That's rather nice. The picture does have a kind of life of its own. You see it out of the frame, you take it over into different light near the window, and the thing breathes. It has an enormous living quality. [...] It's the only way of describing it -- saying, "This is something which has a living presence." I wouldn't want to be in the same room with Mona Lisa at night.

Leonardo da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp inadvertently wrote an interesting little horror story here, I think.

(Quoted from "The Mona Lisa's Endless and Problematic Allure", timestamp around 17:50. I thought he was a bit of a blowhard in other parts of the interview but I haven't spent my life studying Leonardo and only saw the Mona Lisa myself by accident, so who am I to throw stones.)

Leverage and White Collar fandoms, this seems relevant to your interests and possibly a hook for a fantastic fanfic of some kind.

Short version: Christie's Auction House was recently locked down by a cyberattack that essentially hobbled them for the entire month of May. The article discusses how high-end auction houses and sales sites don't pay much attention to cybersecurity, despite storing the personal information, including payment data, and fine art ownership status, of some of the wealthiest people in the world.

It's not necessarily easy to steal the identity of a super wealthy person because they have safeguards in place to prevent that kind of thing, but knowing where they live and their social security number is not inconsiderable. And if you're looking to steal a specific painting or make one extremely high-value theft, it's invaluable data. Especially if Christie's keeps any kinds of notes about where the art was shipped, since the Geneva Freeport and places like it are not immune to being robbed and because they're basically storage facilities, if you're smart about it the robbery may not even be noticed for years.

List of Books to Read Before You Die

1. Any book you want

2. Don’t read books you don’t want to read

3. That’s it

4. Congratulations you did it

Just talking some Shivadh Romances stuff out to myself, but because I have no inner monologue, I'm actually talking it out to all of you -- aren't you guys lucky :D

I did a bit of cleanup on the Chicken Salad War working document today, and aside from a few iffy points to navigate I think I've got it pretty much laid out. There's 25K words complete, so in theory I'm roughly halfway through the book. It's closer to 1/3 complete in terms of pure timeline, because the book covers from mid-May 2023 through the end of the summer, and at 25K words I haven't quite hit July yet. But much of May and June were groundwork, and the rest is outlined, so I expect July and August to take up slightly less real estate, just more important real estate.

I'm pretty sure it'll come in under 80K, which was the goal. Short and sharp, this one, at least I hope.

The football novel is its own mess, but I'll sort that out later, and then I have a couple of options. There are some time constraints; I need to write the "roman ruin" novel soon, because that has to happen before Gerald finishes collectivizing the estate, and I also need to write Ophelia's Ofelia's (fucking autocorrect) novel soon, since that one is meant to take place during the transition in Galia from monarchy to democracy. So those are, in theory, the next two on the slate.

After that it's the "legalizing davzda" novel, and then from there things are a bit more amorphous, lots of ideas but nothing concretely laid out -- three different historical novels I could work on, or I'm also considering a story about the Duke of Marliave, and one about AI. The AI one was a lot more fun sounding a year or two ago, admittedly. And I'd like to revisit Santa Luna, if for no other reason than it means I get to use the title "The Santa Luna Literary Criticism and Practical Magic Society" referencing Ceece's book club that is also possibly a coven; that could offer an update on Noah too, since by then he'll be at UCSC and sailing to Santa Luna on weekends to hang with the Ramblers.

It's ambitious, and who knows how much will actually get done, but there is a certain level of drive to completing these things because it means all these bits and pieces of stories I've written can be pulled together cohesively. So we will see...

A couple of weeks ago I had some fun doing this spread to create whole new stories -- mainly just messing around to see if I liked it and how well it worked for me. I do enjoy the reading and I think it has a nice balance of simplicity and detail.

I think for me this spread might work better as a way of reframing an existing narrative -- it feels like it's most useful when you've already got a story and are trying to get a new view of it, or you have part of a story but need help fleshing it out. When I was using it to lay out completely new stories, I found I usually needed slightly more detail about the setting, or about the conflict, so I designed an auxiliary reading that springboards off this one.

So I did a reading titled The Detective's Novice, with my Found Fortune deck.

It begins with the character, which was The Judge (justice, examination). The plot was The Student (academia, a novice), The Book (study, esoterica, autodidacts), and The Spy (surveillance, codes, subterfuge). Setting was Honor (oathkeeping, an older man), Conflict was Fate (predestination, an ill-omened plan), and Resolution was The Elder (a mentor, formal education).

Most of that was pretty straightforward; the plot summary I wrote was "A detective is murdered and his apprentice (novice) must solve the crime, which he thinks was engineered by a secret society. He eventually solves the crime and it turns out that improbably, the secret society does exist, but didn't engineer the murder; he uncovers the secret society and is inducted into it specifically so that he can root out the corruption that it turns out the murdered detective was a part of."

That's fun, but didn't tell me much about the setting, and I didn't feel like I had any very imaginative ideas for that. So I took the Honor card from the Setting position, moved it to the center, and laid out four more cards.

It's pretty straightforward; the cards on the left are "Where" and the cards on the right are "When". If you were doing a different position (say Resolution instead of Setting) you might designate left as "Sacrifices made" and right as "Results of resolution" or similar. In this case, for "where" I pulled The Cat and The Hidden Word (secrecy, wisdom, censorship, authoritarianism), and for "when" I pulled Collapse and The Game Board (destruction, waste, social ambition, political maneuvering). From the first card, Honor, I decided to place it in a high fantasy setting, in an age of chivalry, but every other card in the reading relates to secrecy, corruption, and decline. Given that when and where aren't indicating "real" times and places, I thought it would be interesting to set the story at the end of a high fantasy era, where the fantastical world is facing a form of industrial revolution that is pulling down class barriers but at the same time forcing those in power to become increasingly authoritarian in an attempt to keep knowledge out of the hands of the common classes.

Creative Writing Tarot Spread

Writers block bogging you down? Use this 7-card spread to help jumpstart your creativity! This prompt can help you generate a very basic storyline.

First, pull a character card! Decide for yourself what this means: will your character carry the traits of the positive meanings of this card? Will your character’s conflicts be brought about by the card’s negative meanings? Will your character look like the figure depicted on the card? Will they wield the item depicted on the card? (Note: if your story has multiple main characters, you may wish to pull a card for each)

Next, pull the plot cards! Pull a card for the beginning of your story, a card for the middle, and a card for the end. Again, let yourself decide what this means. Do these cards describe your character’s emotional state(s) as the story progresses? Do these cards describe internal or external conflicts? Do these cards represent other characters your MC will meet along the way?

Finally, pull your meat cards! These cards are the “meat” of your story. Pull one card for the main or most important setting of your story, one card for the main conflict, and one card for the resolution of that conflict.

Have fun with it! Remember that these cards are just tools, and this spread is simply to kickstart your brain. If you get halfway through the spread and come up with something on your own, or if you start writing and realize your plot is deviating from what the cards gave you, don’t stress about it! You write for yourself, not for the cards. Thank them for their help and continue on with your own imagination.

Deck pictured here: The Essential Tarot by Chloé Zarka Grinsnir

Look buddy I know relationships are difficult and I, too, love Hozier's hit 2014 single Take Me To Church, but nothing in your life right now warrants blasting it at top volume on, and I use this term very loosely, a Wednesday "morning".

I have had a series of neighbors in this condo who have all had profoundly toxic relationships and honestly, it's starting to make me appreciate my fundamental inability to find or keep a partner because holy fuck. If it's not accusations of an emotional affair with a social media influencer it's a refusal to be the person who does the dumping or a two week ongoing fight about having lied about fucking one's lab partner. Like I'd love not to be awake hearing this right now but at least I'm in a comfy bed with my cats and hearing it, not living it directly.

Mind you I'm also capable of 1. Keeping it in my pants around people outside my monogamous relationships and 2. Efficiently and quietly dumping someone who isn't, but the point is I've never had to defend myself against accusations that I'm having an emotional affair with a tiktok celebrity at one in the morning.

I did a puzzle! Dearborn "helped".

It's difficult to see but the posters within the puzzle are Chicago themed, showing a lake monster eating a boat, pigeons destroying downtown, and a meteor shower (and Sue wreaking havoc) in the area of the downtown museum campus. I made the mistake of visiting Transit Tees' brickspace shop in Wicker Park while they were having a sale.

[ID: Three photos; in the first two, Dearborn the tortie is wandering around the edges of a puzzle I'm assembling, sitting on it in one and standing on it in another. In the third, the completed puzzle is shown; it is a brick wall with a "Creature Feature" movie style marquee at the top, and three "movie" posters beneath it, as described above.]

HVAC Leak resolved! Turns out it was a refrigerant issue -- there wasn't enough refrigerant in the unit, which prevents the unit from temperature regulating and leads to condensation, which is what the leaks were. Apparently if you install an AC unit in winter time, it often tells you it's "full" of refrigerant before it really is, and then the next summer you get condensation. He checked the lines, topped off the refrigerant, and said unless there's a leaky pipe I should be good to go.

I did ask if it was something I could/should do myself and he said you have to have a special permit to even buy the refrigerant, which makes me wonder wtf is in that stuff. Usually if something's that regulated it's because it can either blow you up, get you high, or poison you.

In any case, we'll see -- he gave me his card so that if it keeps leaking I can get in touch directly, since he's at our building a few times a month anyway for various reasons. I am increasingly glad I went with the company that services our building -- even if I paid more than I might have somewhere else, it's worth it to have people who are here regularly and know their way around.

Well, the Small HVAC Leak that I noticed two weeks ago when changing the filter is now a Large HVAC Leak, thus solving the Adderall vs Weed conundrum. Stimulant medication it is!

The guys who installed the unit, which is still very much under warranty, were coming to look at it tomorrow morning anyway, so at least I don't have to pay Memorial Day Plumbing Emergency prices. The leak isn't so massive that a couple of towels and very judicious use of the AC can't handle it until then, but the cleanup has been a bit intensive.

I may need to bump up my plans to at least redo the bathroom floor. Maybe that'll be a big project for November. I should have the HVAC paid off by then...

Italian transmasc king Oscar Duolingo remains a smooth operator.

[ID: A screengrab of Duolingo showing one of the characters, Oscar, a short, thickset man with a spectacular mustache and heavy brows. He is saying "Ti sei persa? Il cielo e lontano da qui" which I have correctly translated as "Are you lost? Heaven is far from here."]

Well, that bed look lasted *checks notes* four days.

I've been having some sleep issues -- no problems getting to sleep and no restless sleep, but what started as "waking up once a night and being up for about an hour before going for Second Sleep" turned into "waking up every two hours and being up for two hours" which makes for an average of about five hours a night of sleep, which is on the one hand all I really seem to need but on the other far less than ideal.

My body generally acclimates to whatever sleep schedule I set for it fairly quickly, so I thought I'd do some "repair" to my sleep hygiene, start going to bed a bit earlier, and take PM meds for a couple of nights to keep me knocked out for longer periods. Last night was the start and someone apparently got mad that I wasn't getting up at 2am per usual. Behold the visage of a troublesome beaft.

[ID: Polk the tabby is crouched on the plaid duvet cover, notably NOT the one that was previously on the bed; she is looking up at the camera with defiant eyes.]

I don't like to ascribe malice to pets because they're just little creatures who don't generally understand much of how the world works, but I'm like 80% sure she woke me up puking all over the bed at 2:45 specifically because I did not wake up at 2 and spend an hour petting her. Without talking overmuch about puke, suffice to say it was so comprehensive that I had to strip the bed, and given her normal habits I'm pretty sure it was intentional.

It's not entirely a bad thing because part of the reason I was waking up was that the duvet was really too heavy for summer weather; I was also thinking to myself that I was going to have to get rid of the green fitted sheet because I have a thicker than normal mattress and it wasn't really deep enough to stay on well. So, now I've replaced duvet-and-cover with just a heavier duvet cover without the duvet inside it, and the green sheet has been taken off -- I'm going to cut the corners, trim the elastic off, hem it, and turn it into a flat sheet.

But also I got slightly less than six hours of sleep last night, was forcibly woken from sedated sleep, and the work week is off to a fantastic start. I'm going to go bury my face in a mug of cold brew.

Changed the bed over for spring! I'm calling this bed look "foggy summer". Dearborn, as usual, is spokesmeowdel and bed tester, and gave her full approval by hocking a hairball on the duvet cover like eight hours after I took this photo.

[ID: Two photographs of my bed, a low wooden frame with a queen mattress; it has a light green fitted sheet, a dark grey topsheet, and a duvet cover of grey and yellow stripes, with pillowcases matching the color scheme. In the second one, Dearborn the tortie is rolling around joyously on the duvet.]

Un'altra fontana nella città! Questo è nel mio parco, e il mio nome è sulla una pietra che dice "Sam, Deebs, and Dot". Lo adoro. (Another fountain in the city! This is in my park, and my name is on a stone that says "Sam, Deebs, and Dot". I love it.)

[ID: A photo of another pocket park, Printer's Square Park, showing a colorful art deco style fountain surrounded by greenery and with trees in the background. A number of engraved bricks are set into the fountain base, including mine.]

Una fontana della "città nel giardino". (A fountain of the "city in the garden".)

[ID: a picture of the fountain outside the Chicago Water Tower, a small concrete pool set almost flush with the sloping ground, with five jets of water firing into the air at various heights. Behind the fountain are seats and trees in the water tower "pocket park", one of many in Chicago.]